“Do you have time for lunch Thursday? We could meet at the club.”
“Thanks, Mom, but I promised Marci I’d have lunch with her on Thursday. Rain check?”
As she spoke, Suzanne opened her email and typed Lunch Thursday? to Marci and hit Send. She hated lying to her mother, but didn’t think she could handle lunch at the club just yet.
“Certainly, sugar. It’s just that there was something I wanted to ask you.”
“Okay,” Suzanne said slowly. “Can you ask me now?”
“Well, I know how… rough it’s been for you this past couple of weeks, and I was wondering if Daddy and I could lend you some money? Just until you get on your feet again.”
“Daddy wants to lend me money?” Suzanne was surprised.
“Of course, honey,” her mother said nervously. “I mean, you know how proud we both are of you.”
“Does he know you’re calling me?”
“Not exactly, but your father has been so busy. I didn’t want to bother him with a little thing like this. I feel certain he won’t mind a bit.”
Busy, right. If she were a lawyer and this were a small law firm she’d started, maybe he’d think it worth rescuing. “How is Daddy doing with all of it?” she asked cautiously. Imagining how he’d reacted to seeing his baby girl in what seemed a compromising position in the papers was not pleasant.
“Oh, sweetie. You know your dad. He’ll be fine. Now, I’m writing you a check for say, five thousand dollars. That should cover your expenses for a while. You can buy some sensible suits and start interviewing for jobs. I don’t think the ladies at the League will be too hard on you, especially once we explain—”
“Mom,” Suzanne said through gritted teeth. “I thought the loan was to help me rebuild my business.”
“Oh, come on, Suzanne. Don’t you think this little venture of yours has run its course? All those events with alcohol and celebrities.” She said alcohol and celebrities with distaste, as though she were saying flatulence and defecation.
“I love what I do, Mom. I’m not going to let a little setback knock me out of the game.”
“Of course. I just hate seeing your college degree go to waste. I think I heard that Bolton Academy is looking for an elementary art teacher; you’d be perfect—”
“Hold on, Mom. I have another call.” It was true. The red light on her second line was blinking rapidly. “Suzanne Hamilton,” she said, switching to the other line without waiting for her mother’s reply.
She was surprised to hear the chipmunk voice of Yvette, sounding stiff and awkward. “Hello, Suzanne. I hope you have recovered from your, er, sudden illness?”
Her tone indicated that Suzanne’s recovery was not at all among her chief concerns. In any case, she didn’t wait for a reply. “I’m calling with a message from Mr. Burke. I just want it noted for the record that I have advised Mr. Burke against this course of action,” she said. Suzanne held her breath.
“Mr. Burke wishes me to ask whether quote-unquote hillbilly weddings are in your repertoire? His sister Kate is getting married Memorial Day weekend at Dylan’s mountain cabin in Tennessee and he’d like you to plan the wedding.”
“I don’t do weddings,” Suzanne replied reflexively. It had been her mantra ever since she went into event planning. Marci and Jake’s wedding had been the only exception, ever.
“Of course not,” Yvette sneered. “You have your reputation to consider. That’s what I told Mr. Burke.”
“Even if I did, six weeks isn’t much time to plan a whole wedding.”
“I agree,” said Yvette. “Though Kate is quite set on the date. Her fiancée has a professional commitment in a month and they want to be married beforehand. Still, I told Mr. Burke I thought it would be better to hire a real wedding planner. And as there will be some media attention, I have suggested we hire someone…less inflammatory? Of course, you can’t disagree with that.”
Suzanne could not disagree. And yet she wanted to, desperately.
The red light was still blinking on Line One, where her mother waited for her to accept help and get a regular job like everyone else. Here on Line Two, was a woman she didn’t like, representing a man she was too humiliated to even consider facing again, with an opportunity to do something she had always hated. It was a no-brainer.
“I’ll do it,” Suzanne said in a rush.
At the other end of the line, Yvette was quiet. Suzanne continued, assuring herself as much as she was Yvette, “I’d be honored to help Kate Burke plan her wedding. Thank you and Mr. Burke so much for the generous opportunity.”
The squeaky manager recovered from her apparent shock, and her tone was composed and polite when she finally answered. “Lovely. Email me a contract and I’ll get you the basic details. Kate is out of the country, but she has some preliminary ideas gathered that I think you’ll find useful. I can have someone on our staff get them to your office on…Monday? Is that soon enough?”
“Sure,” Suzanne said numbly.
She heard a shuffling of papers as Yvette went on matter-of-factly. “You’ll meet with Kate when she gets back from Prague. Let’s see, she’s flying in Sunday, April twenty-seventh. How’s that following Tuesday? I assume you have no other clients beating down your door right now?”
Suzanne could almost hear the smirk at the other end of the line.
“No, I don’t,” Suzanne said. “Thank you so much for taking that into consideration. Tuesday the twenty-ninth is fine.” She hung up without waiting for a response.
#
When Jake and Marci arrived for lunch on Thursday, they found Suzanne researching Dylan Burke online. “Obsessing much?” Jake asked, and then recoiled from the look Suzanne sent his way.
“Jake,” she trilled as sweetly as possible. “I need your wife for a few moments. Could you make yourself useful and water the plants?” She gestured to the row of ferns hanging high along the enormous wall of windows.
Jake came around the desk and rubbed Suzanne’s shoulders playfully. “Anything for you, my dear,” he said. As he headed back to the storage closet to get the ladder and watering can, he called over his shoulder, “There’s nothing like having two wives. Some guys aren’t even lucky enough to have one.”
“Well, I guess that makes you twice the husband, honey,” Marci called after him, winking at Suzanne. She then turned to look more closely at the computer, where Suzanne had an article pulled up about Dylan and his family—one of few Suzanne had found that mentioned his younger sister Kate. Most articles focused on his mom and her other daughters, Sherrie and Amber. “What are you doing, really? Dylan Burke fired you, right?”
Suzanne shook her head, and launched into the story about Yvette’s call and Kate Burke’s wedding. She was just getting to the part where she had stupidly agreed to do a famous person’s wedding in just a few weeks—with the bride herself out of the country for a third of that time—when Jake called to them. “Guys? Can you come here for a second?”
They obeyed, exchanging looks of confusion, and found Jake standing in the enormous storage closet behind the loft’s bathroom, scratching his head. At first glance, Suzanne didn’t see anything amiss. The closet was tidy and organized, as usual.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He pointed. “Is this the ladder you fell off before Dylan’s party?” She had forgotten until now that it was broken.
“Um, yes. Sorry, I forgot that you can’t use the top step, but I think you are tall enough—”
“No, Suzanne,” Jake said, with no trace of humor in his charming face. “I think maybe you should consider calling the police.”
#
Officer Frank Caputo of the Atlanta PD was polite and thorough, if not overly helpful. He had arrived about twenty minutes after Suzanne called. He jotted down the details of Suzanne’s fall from the ladder, including the time of day she’d gone to the emergency room and the name of the doctor she’d seen. He took a picture on his cell phone of the broken ladder, and
of what Jake had just discovered: the tiny metal shavings on the floor underneath it.
They looked like silvery-black pencil shavings, in a small pile next to the baseboard of the closet. Once Jake pointed them out, Suzanne was surprised she hadn’t noticed them when she pulled the ladder out originally. Jake had noticed them, though, which led him to look more closely at the broken step. A single jagged point of metal stuck out where the top of the step had remained connected to the side; the rest of the break was clean. Someone had sawed almost all the way through the step before Suzanne had stood there. Her fall had not been an accident.
Officer Caputo had agreed with this assessment. Beyond, that, however, he seemed to have little to offer.
“How many people have keys to the office?” he asked, sounding bored.
“Just me, my assistant Chad, and the landlord.”
“Your assistant? Any problems there?”
“None,” she said without hesitation.
“Is there anyone your landlord might have let in recently? Like to do service on the unit?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Suzanne said, thinking. “The last time was a broken toilet, but that’s been…more than six months ago. There have been some vendors here dropping things off for an event recently, but Chad always meets them here with the key.”
“Have you filed any other reports recently?”
“Well, my tires were slashed a month or so ago,” Suzanne said. “There was someone in my spot so I had to park on the street. I was here late; I just assumed it was some neighborhood kids.”
“Any problems with the neighbors?”
“No.”
“Recent breakups? Boyfriends?”
Marci snorted, and then recoiled under Suzanne’s glare. Officer Caputo gave her a questioning expression.
“There have been a few…I’ve dated a good bit recently.” She tried for her usual Southern charm, but it sounded instead like a bad imitation of Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.
I declare, sir, I have had a good many gentleman callers.
“Anyone you may have rejected?” the police officer asked. “Maybe someone more interested in you than you were in him?”
Suzanne bit her lip.
Marci interjected, “That pretty much describes all of them.”
The officer gave Suzanne a look she couldn’t read, and she stared down at her feet, reddening in response. The elbow she aimed at Marci missed by inches.
“Ma’am, I’ll file a report, but there’s not much we can do for you unless you have some idea who is doing this.” He handed her a photocopied page with a blurry title across the top—“Ten Tips for Stalking Victims.” Stalking. Shit.
“You might want to make a list of boyfriends, or, um… dates, you’ve had in the last year or so.” Suzanne could tell the word “dates” made the young officer uncomfortable, and she suddenly felt inexplicably dirty. “Maybe even further back if you can think of anyone who might be upset with you. Are you ever here alone?”
Suzanne thought about Chad’s new job with a lump in her throat. “All the time,” she said softly.
“You should have an alarm installed here, and maybe at your residence. You live alone?”
“Yes.”
“Well, try not to get too worked up about it. Use common sense—don’t walk alone at night, stay in touch with your family and friends, lock your doors. Don’t open the door to anyone you’re not expecting. Two-thirds of stalkers are someone you know, the other third are strangers. Either way, awareness is your best weapon.
“I’d suggest keeping a small camera with you to take pictures if anything happens or you see a suspicious car. You can call us with the license plate. We’ll file a report and that will help, if you get a protective order later.”
“Protective order?” Suzanne couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. “Will that help?”
The officer’s tone was professional, emotionless. “Sometimes it does, if whoever did this to you is afraid of being arrested. Of course, it doesn’t matter until you know who it is.”
“So there’s nothing you can do?” Marci demanded.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, there’s not. Not until we have more information.” He turned to Suzanne, and her face must have looked as colorless as it felt, because he softened a bit. He put a large, rough hand on her shoulder. “Make your list. Keep your eyes and ears open. If you get any evidence of who might have done this to you, call us.”
Chapter 10
Three hours later, Suzanne and Marci sat in the kitchen of Suzanne’s large Buckhead condo, waiting for brownies to finish baking. From the adjacent living room, they could hear Jake snoring on the couch. He had fallen asleep watching basketball.
“I don’t think anyone will bother you tonight,” Marci said. “Jake snores like a bear with hay fever. That should scare people away.”
Suzanne was silent, washing out the bowl of brownie batter in the sink.
“They smell amazing. It was a good idea to make them,” Marci went on. “Remember when we used to do this in high school? And we’d add all those weird ingredients? Basically anything we could find at my house.”
Suzanne laughed. “I remember. You always wanted to add cherries to everything.”
“Hey!” Marci said defensively. “Maraschino cherries are good! Besides, they’re fruit, so they’re healthy. Mmm…you don’t have any, do you?”
“Yes, I do,” Suzanne said. “I keep them right next to the giant pack of hot dogs and frozen chicken nuggets I always have on hand in case an elementary school takes a field trip to my apartment.”
“No need for sarcasm,” Marci said. She rubbed her belly thoughtfully. “I probably will have that stuff on hand before long.”
Suzanne could see that Marci’s already soft waist was beginning to thicken and protrude more than usual. She felt wistful, wishing she could feel more excited for her best friend about the new baby. She wanted to reach out to her, but she knew nothing about pregnancy and even less about babies. What could she possibly offer?
“Just don’t bake those horrible Dr. Pepper brownies for your kids. Remember those?”
“Oh my God! What were we thinking?” Marci rolled her eyes. “Didn’t we put vanilla pudding in those, too?”
Suzanne nodded grimly. The results had been disastrous—a soupy, frothy mess that had been completely inedible, even with spoons and teenage determination. Mrs. Thompson had sent them to the grocery store early the next morning to replace all the ingredients they’d wasted, and gently suggested that they find a hobby other than baking to occupy themselves on Friday nights.
“So should I go through what we have so far?” Marci suggested. On the kitchen island lay a legal pad covered with names and notes.
“Sure,” Suzanne sighed.
“Okay, Rick, we got—and personally he seems the likely candidate to me. Dated for three weeks, broke up a month ago. Reason…did I get a reason for him?”
“Do we have to write the reasons?” Suzanne protested for the third time. “Really, does it matter?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Marci. “You never know what might help narrow it down.”
“Fine,” Suzanne said. Marci seemed to enjoy her role as junior detective a little too much. “He talked about himself too much. His vocabulary was atrocious. He was…sort of barbaric, I guess.”
“Barbaric…vocabulary…,” Marci muttered as she wrote. “Got it. Okay, what’s he doing now?”
“He’s in sales, and he travels all over the state. I don’t know whether he’s dating anyone. He—he had to mail me my underwear.”
“Underwear…,” Marci repeated, writing. Suzanne waited for the inevitable joke but none came. “Okay, before that was Damian. Pro basketball player, dated three months—hey, that was pretty good, Suze!”
“He was out of town a lot,” Suzanne answered drily.
“Broke up because…?”
“We’ve been over this. He was too young for me. He a
lways had girls trying to follow him back to his hotel room. I couldn’t compete with that.”
“So he cheated on you?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Suzanne said thoughtfully. “But it was only a matter of time, right?”
“Riiiiight,” Marci said, with no small amount of sarcasm. “Any chance it could be him?”
“Doubt it,” Suzanne said. “He’s busy all the time, and he wasn’t really too upset when I ended it. Besides, he’s not here that often. He has an apartment here during the season but his family is all in Chicago, so he spends most of his time there.”
“Hmm…not upset. Are you sure?”
“Well, he sent me some free tickets the other day with a nice little note. I have them here somewhere. I was planning to give them to Jake but in all the excitement I forgot.”
“Sent…free…tickets…,” Marci repeated and made a contemplative noise. Suddenly she was Columbo, apparently.
“So your theory is that the professional basketball player, who could have just about any girl he wanted, was so devastated by our breakup that he is taking time out of his busy game schedule to slash my tires and sabotage my office ladder? And he’s sending me tickets to a game where twenty thousand people will be watching so that he can…what? Kill me at halftime?”
Marci chewed the end of the pen. “Perhaps not. Who’s next?”
“Kenneth.”
“Kenneth, stockbroker, dated six weeks. Broke up because”—Marci peered more closely at her notes, as though she had not been Suzanne’s sole confidant for each and every turn of these events—“because he had a hairy back—ew—and was ‘weird about kids.’ What does that mean?”
“You remember this, don’t you? He wanted kids a little too much?”
Marci flipped a couple of pages. “Two years ago you broke up with Xavier because he didn’t want kids.”
“I know. I’d like to have the option, I guess. But Kenneth was more interested in the kids than in the grownup part of the relationship. Like he was just looking for a womb.”
“Womb…got it. Now, Brad Number Two.”
“Brad Two was too outdoorsy for me. A little too Grizzly Adams, you know? Plus, he had smelly feet.”
Regrets Only (Sequel to The Marriage Pact) Page 8